Government reform of Peter I - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Government reform of Peter I refers to modifications made to the state apparatus of Russia during the rule of Peter I

Peter I of Russia

Peter the Great, Peter I or Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov Dates indicated by the letters "O.S." are Old Style. All other dates in this article are New Style. ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his half-brother, Ivan V...

.

Peter ascended to the throne in 1682; he ruled jointly with his half-brother Ivan V. After Ivan's death in 1696, Peter implemented a series of sweeping reforms aimed at modernizing Russia, modeled on Enlightenment ideals and influenced by advisers from Western Europe. At first, these reforms were intended to support the Great Northern War

Great Northern War

The Great Northern War was a conflict in which a coalition led by the Tsardom of Russia successfully contested the supremacy of the Swedish Empire in northern Central Europe and Eastern Europe. The initial leaders of the anti-Swedish alliance were Peter I the Great of Russia, Frederick IV of...

; later, more systematic reforms significantly changed the internal construction and administration of the state.

Background

During the Great Northern War

Great Northern War

(1700-1721), which dominated most of Peter's reign, Russia, along with a host of allies, seized control of the Baltic Sea

Baltic Sea

The Baltic Sea is a brackish mediterranean sea located in Northern Europe, from 53°N to 66°N latitude and from 20°E to 26°E longitude. It is bounded by the Scandinavian Peninsula, the mainland of Europe, and the Danish islands. It drains into the Kattegat by way of the Øresund, the Great Belt and...

from Sweden

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

and gained considerable influence in Central

Central Europe

Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...

and Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

. The war, one of history's costliest at the time, consumed significant financial and economic resources, and the administrative system Peter had inherited from his predecessors strained to gather and manage resources. During his Grand Embassy

Grand Embassy of Peter I

The Grand Embassy was a Russian diplomatic mission, sent to Western Europe in 1697-1698 by Peter the Great....

(Великое посольство), Peter conducted negotiations with a number of European powers to strengthen his position against Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, and his exposure to the more developed nations of Western Europe

Western Europe

Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...

motivated him to take steps toward turning Russia into an industrial economy. Despite Russia's vast size and considerable natural resources, a number of factors, including corruption and inefficiency, hampered economic growth. Peter believed that targeted reform could not only strengthen his hold on power, but increase the efficiency of the government, and thus better the lot of his people.

Another major goal of Peter's reform was reducing the influence of the Boyars, Russia's elite nobility, who stressed Slavic

Slavic peoples

The Slavic people are an Indo-European panethnicity living in Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe, North Asia and Central Asia. The term Slavic represents a broad ethno-linguistic group of people, who speak languages belonging to the Slavic language family and share, to varying degrees, certain...

supremacy and opposed European influence. While their clout had declined since the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Boyar Duma, an advisory council to the tsar, still wielded considerable political power. Peter saw them as backwards and obstacles standing in the way of Europeanization and reform. He specifically targeted the boyars with numerous taxes and obligatory services, including a tax on beards

Beard tax

A beard tax is one of several taxes introduced throughout history on men who wear beards.-In England:In 1535, King Henry VIII of England, who wore a beard himself, introduced a tax on beards. The tax was a graduated tax, varying with the wearer's social position...

.

Like most of Russia's legal system at the time, Peter's reforms were codified and articulated in a series of royal decrees (, literally "imposition"), issued chiefly between 1700 and 1721.

Administrative reform

Prior to Peter's rule, Russia's administrative system was relatively antiquated compared to that in many Western European nations. The state was divided into uyezd

Uyezd

Uyezd or uezd was an administrative subdivision of Rus', Muscovy, Russian Empire, and the early Russian SFSR which was in use from the 13th century. Uyezds for most of the history in Russia were a secondary-level of administrative division...

s, which mostly consisted of cities and their immediate surrounding areas; this system divided the population unevenly and was extremely clumsy to manage. In 1708, Peter abolished these old national subdivisions and established in their place eight governorates (guberniya
Guberniya
A guberniya was a major administrative subdivision of the Russian Empire usually translated as government, governorate, or province. Such administrative division was preserved for sometime upon the collapse of the empire in 1917. A guberniya was ruled by a governor , a word borrowed from Latin ,...

s): Moscow

Moscow Governorate

Moscow Governorate , or Government of Moscow, was an administrative division of the Russian Empire, which existed in 1708–1929....

, Ingermanland, Kiev

Kiev Governorate

Kiev Governorate , or Government of Kiev, was an administrative division of the Russian Empire.The governorate was established in 1708 along with seven other governorates and was transformed into a viceroyalty in 1781...

, Smolensk

Smolensk Governorate

Smolensk Governorate , or Government of Smolensk, was an administrative division of the Russian Empire, which existed, with interruptions, between 1708 and 1929....

, Archangelgorod

Archangelgorod Governorate

Archangelgorod Governorate , or the Government of Archangelgorod, was an administrative division of the Russian Empire, which existed from 1708 until 1780. Its seat was in Archangel...

, Kazan

Kazan Governorate

The Kazan Governorate or Government of Kazan was a governorate of Imperial Russia from 1708–1920, with the city of Kazan as its capital.-History:...

, Azov, and Siberian. Another decree in 1713 established Landrats (from the German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

word for "national council") in each of the governorates, staffed by between eight and twelve professional civil servants, who assisted a royally-appointed governor.

In 1719, after the establishment of the Collegia

Collegium (ministry)

The collegia were government departments in Imperial Russia, established in 1717 by Peter the Great...

, Peter remade Russia's administrative divisions once more. The new Russian provinces were modeled on the Swedish

Sweden

system of provinces, in which larger, more politically important areas received more political autonomy, while smaller, more rural areas were controlled more directly by the state.

Table of Ranks

Peter's distrust of the elitist and anti-reformist Boyars culminated in 1722 with the creation of the Table of Ranks , a formal list of ranks in the Russian military, government, and royal court. The Table of Ranks established a complex system of titles and honorifics, each classed with a number (I to XIV) denoting a specific level of service or loyalty to the Tsar. The origins of the Table of Ranks lie in Russia's military ranking system, which was also significantly modified and revised under Peter's rule.

The establishment of the Table of Ranks was among the most audacious of Peter's reforms, a direct blow to the power of the Boyars which changed Russian society significantly. Previously, high-ranking state positions were hereditary, but with the establishment of the Table of Ranks, anyone, including a commoner, could work their way up the bureaucratic hierarchy with sufficient hard work and skill. A new generation of technocrats soon supplanted the old Boyar class and dominated the civil service in Russia. With minimal modifications, the Table of Ranks remained in effect until the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Finance and Trade

Fighting the Great Northern War required unprecedented economic resources, and Russia's yawning budget deficit and aging infrastructure meant that the state could not effectively allocate resources and money in wartime. Peter's government was constantly in dire need of money, and at first it responded by monopolizing certain strategic industries, such as salt

Salt

In chemistry, salts are ionic compounds that result from the neutralization reaction of an acid and a base. They are composed of cations and anions so that the product is electrically neutral...

, alcohol

Alcohol

In chemistry, an alcohol is an organic compound in which the hydroxy functional group is bound to a carbon atom. In particular, this carbon center should be saturated, having single bonds to three other atoms....

, oak

Oak

An oak is a tree or shrub in the genus Quercus , of which about 600 species exist. "Oak" may also appear in the names of species in related genera, notably Lithocarpus...

, and tar

Tar

Tar is modified pitch produced primarily from the wood and roots of pine by destructive distillation under pyrolysis. Production and trade in tar was a major contributor in the economies of Northern Europe and Colonial America. Its main use was in preserving wooden vessels against rot. The largest...

. Peter also taxed many Russian cultural customs (such as bathing, fishing, beekeeping, and wearing beards) and issued tax stamps for paper goods. However, with each new tax came new loopholes and new ways to avoid them, and so it became clear that tax reform was simply not enough.

The solution was a sweeping new poll tax

Poll tax

A poll tax is a tax of a portioned, fixed amount per individual in accordance with the census . When a corvée is commuted for cash payment, in effect it becomes a poll tax...

, which replaced a household tax on cultivated land. Previously, peasants had skirted the tax by combining several households into one estate; now, however, each peasant was assessed individually for a tax of 70 kopeks, paid in cash. This was significantly heavier than the taxes it replaced, and it enabled the Russian state to expand its treasury almost sixfold between 1680 and 1724. Peter also pursued proto-protectionist trade policies, placing heavy tariffs on imports and trade to maintain a favorable environment for Russian-made goods.

Class structure

Peter's reign deepened the subjugation of serfs to the will of landowners. He firmly enforced class divisions, believing that "just as the landowner was to be tied to service, the townsman to his trade or handicraft, so the peasant was tied to the land." Peter endowed estate-owners to broad new rights, including a requirement that no serf leave his master's estate without written permission. Furthermore, Peter's new tax code significantly expanded the number of taxable workers, shifting an even heavier burden onto the shoulders of the working class.

A handful of Peter's slightly more progressive reforms imitated Enlightenment ideals; he did, for example, create a new class of serfs, known as state peasants, who had broader rights than ordinary serfs, but paid dues to the state. He also created state-sanctioned handicraft shops in large cities, inspired by similar shops he had observed in The Netherlands, to provide products for the army. Evidence even suggests that Peter's advisers recommended the abolition of serfdom and the creation of a form of "limited freedom" (a reality that did not come to pass until two centuries later). Nevertheless, the gap between slaves and serfs shrank considerably under Peter, and by the end of his reign the two were basically indistinguishable.

Senate

On the 22 February 1711 a new state body was established by ukaz- The Governing Senate . All its members were appointed by Tsar Peter I from among his own associates and originally consisted of 10 people. All appointments and resignations of senators occurred by personal imperial decrees. The senate did not interrupt the activity and was the permanent operating state body.

The first members of the Senate were:

Count Ivan Musin-Pushkin
Boyar Tikhon Streshnev
Tikhon Streshnev
Tikhon Nikitich Streshnev was a Russian boyar and statesman during the reign of Peter I of Russia, one of the first members of the Governing Senate and the first governor of Moscow after the post was reformed by Peter....
Prince Pyotr Golitsin
Prince Mikhail Dolgorukov
Grigori Plemyannikov
Prince Grigori Volkonsky
Mikhail Samarin
Vasiliy Apukhtin
Nazariy Milnitskiy
Ober-secretary Anisim Shchukin

Collegia

On 12 December 1717 Peter I

Peter I of Russia

established nine collegia
Collegium (ministry)
The collegia were government departments in Imperial Russia, established in 1717 by Peter the Great...

or boards which replaced old Prikaz

Prikaz

Prikaz was an administrative or judicial office in Muscovy and Russia of 15th-18th centuries. The term is usually translated as "ministry", "office" or "department". In modern Russian "prikaz" means administrative or military order...

s. Each collegium had a President and Vice-President, but some Vice-Presidents were never appointed.

The original nine were:

Collegium of Foreign Affairs
Collegium of Foreign Affairs
The Collegium of Foreign Affairs was a Russian executive body , created in the government reform of 1717. It was de-established during the decentralising reforms of Catherine II of Russia. Its first President was Fyodor Golovin....

, which replaced Posolsky Prikaz.
- President: Fyodor Golovin.
- Vice-President: Baron Pyotr Shafirov
  Peter Shafirov
  Baron Peter Pavlovich Shafirov , Russian statesman, one of the ablest coadjutors of Peter the Great.Shafirov was born into the family if Pavel Shafirov, a translator in the Russian Foreign Office, of Polish Jewish extraction...
  
  .
Collegium of State Income
Collegium of State Income
The Collegium of State Income was a Russian executive body , created in the government reform of 1717. It was de-established during the decentralising reforms of Catherine II of Russia. Its first President was Dmitry Golitsin....

(Kamer-kollegiia), or Collegium of Tax Collection, or Revenue.
- President: Prince Dmitry Golitsin
  Galitzine
  For Orthodox clergyman and theologian, see Alexander Golitzin.The Galitzines are one of the largest and noblest princely houses of Russia. Since the extinction of the Korecki family in the 17th century, the Golitsyns have claimed dynastic seniority in the House of Gediminas...
  
  .
- Vice-President: Baron Karl Nirot.
Collegium of Justice
Collegium of Justice
The Collegium of Justice was a Russian executive body , created in the government reform of 1717. It was de-established during the decentralising reforms of Catherine II of Russia. Its first President was Andrey Matveev....

, or Collegium of civics.
- President: Andrey Matveev.
- Vice-President: Hermann von Brevern.
Collegium of Accounting
Collegium of Accounting
The Collegium of Accounting was a Russian executive body , created in the government reform of 1717. It was de-established during the decentralising reforms of Catherine II of Russia. Its first President was Vasily Dolgorukov....

(Revizion-kollegiia), or Revision or Audit Collegium.
- President: Prince Vasily Dolgorukov
  Vasily Lukich Dolgorukov
  Prince Vasiliy Lukich Dolgorukov was a Russian diplomat and minister who was the most powerful man in the country in the later years of Peter II's reign....
  
  .
- Vice-President: has not been appointed.
Collegium of War
- President: Prince Alexander Menshikov.
- Vice-President: Adam Veyde
  Adam Veyde
  Adam Adamovich Veyde was a Russian infantry general and a close associate of Peter the Great.Adam Veyde began his military career in the so called poteshnye voiska. He participated in both of the Azov campaigns, being a major of Preobrazhensky Lifeguard regiment in charge of engineer works during...
  
  .
Collegium of the Navy or Amiralteyskiy Collegium.
- President: Count Fyodor Apraksin.
- Vice-President: Cornelius Cruys
  Cornelius Cruys
  Cornelius Cruys was a Norwegian-born Vice Admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy and the first commander of the Russian Baltic Fleet.-Early life and career:...
  
  .
Collegium of Commerce
Collegium of Commerce
The Collegium of Commerce was a Russian executive body , created in the government reform of 1717. It was de-established in 1796 or 1786 following the decentralising reforms of Catherine II of Russia. Its first President was Pyotr Tolstoy....
- President: Count Pyotr Tolstoy
  Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy
  Count Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy was a Russian statesman prominent during and after the reign of Peter the Great. He was the ancestor of all the Counts Tolstoy, including the novelist Leo Tolstoy Count Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy (1645 – 1729) was a Russian statesman prominent during and after the...
  
  .
- Vice-President: Shmidt.
Collegium of State Expenses
Collegium of State Expenses
The Collegium of State Expenses was a Russian executive body , created in the government reform of 1717. It was de-established during the decentralising reforms of Catherine II of Russia. Its first President was Ivan Musin-Pushkin....

(Shtats-Kontor)
- President: Count Ivan Musin-Pushkin.
- Vice-President: has not been appointed.
Collegium of Mining and Manufacturing
Collegium of Mining and Manufacturing
The Collegium of Mining and Manufacturing was a Russian executive body , created in the government reform of 1717. Its first President was Ivan Musin-Pushkin....
- President: Jacob Bruce
  Jacob Bruce
  Jacob Daniel Bruce was a Russian statesman, military leader and scientist of self-claimed Scottish descent , one of the associates of Peter the Great. According to his own record, his ancestors had lived in Russia since 1649....
  
  .
- Vice-President: was not appointed.

Success of Peter's Reforms

Peter's reforms set him apart from the Tsars that preceded him. In Muscovite Russia

Grand Duchy of Moscow

The Grand Duchy of Moscow or Grand Principality of Moscow, also known in English simply as Muscovy , was a late medieval Rus' principality centered on Moscow, and the predecessor state of the early modern Tsardom of Russia....

, the state's functions were limited mostly to military defense, collection of taxes, and enforcement of class divisions. In contrast, legislation under Peter's rule covered every aspect of life in Russia with exhaustive detail, and they significantly affected the everyday lives of nearly every Russian citizen. The success of reform contributed greatly to Russia's success in the Great Northern War; the increase in revenue and productivity increased the strength of the Russian war machine. More importantly, however, Peter created a "well-ordered police state" that further legitimized and strengthened authoritarian rule in Russia. A testament to this lasting influence are the many public institutions in the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

and the Russian Federation, such as Moscow State University

Moscow State University

Lomonosov Moscow State University , previously known as Lomonosov University or MSU , is the largest university in Russia. Founded in 1755, it also claims to be one of the oldest university in Russia and to have the tallest educational building in the world. Its current rector is Viktor Sadovnichiy...

, which trace their origins back to Peter's rule.

Sources

Cracraft, James. The Revolution of Peter the Great. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Raeff, Marc. Peter the Great Changes Russia, 2nd edition. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1972
Raeff, Marc. Problems in European Civilization: Peter the Great, Reformer or Revolutionary? Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1963.
Riasonovsky, Nicholas. A History of Russia, 8th edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
S. M. Soloviev
Sergey Solovyov
Sergey Mikhaylovich Solovyov was one of the greatest Russian historians whose influence on the next generation of Russian historians was paramount. His son Vladimir Solovyov was one of the most influential Russian philosophers...

History of Russia, v. XVI, ch. 3.
Sumner, B.H. Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire. Hamden: Archon Books, 1965
Sumner, B.H. Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia. London: English Universities Press, 1960
Vernadsky, George. Political & Diplomatic History of Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1936.

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